WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, UCADI #178 I-3 - The anarchist communists, the Jewish and Palestinian questions I. - The Jewish component of the international socialist, communist and anarchist movement (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

In the desolate lands of Eastern and Central Europe, fueled by the
development of productive forces, the agricultural proletariat was
slowly transformed into an industrial proletariat, while the demographic
growth of the overall population saw a reduction in the available
economic and food resources. Therefore a growing flow of proletarians,
workers and landless peasants chose the path of emigration to the
Americas. This endless army of dispossessed was equipped with chains of
solidarity, fed by barefoot, itinerant doctors who provided care to the
sick, by volunteer teachers who clandestinely taught reading and
writing, to provide those minimal elements of defense to the poor,
seeking of a better future, influenced by the nihilistic ideas that were
increasingly spreading in Russian and German culture. Soon in the wake
of these ideas, that of socialism and anarchism made their way, becoming
hegemonic, fueled by the development of the productive forces and its
laws and revealing the mechanisms of social domination and highlighting
the robbery function of capitalism. The increasingly widespread
awareness of the peasant proletariat and the increasingly numerous
industrial proletariat pushed the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Prussia
itself to adopt more modern labor legislation, which allowed the birth
of workers' and peasants' associations, the formation of trade unions ,
phenomena on which the reformist socialist parties had a significant
impact, allowing the development of these organizations. Workers'
associations born in France with the Bourses du travail, wanted and
established by anarchists such as Fernan Pelloutier, soon spread
throughout Europe with unexpected rapidity, giving ever greater strength
to workers' organisations. Similar structures spread throughout the
world, leading to the birth of anarcho-syndicalist and revolutionary
syndicalist trade unions which increased their importance in the first
twenty years of the 20th century and subsequently gave life to the AIT
(International Association of Anarchist and Revolutionary Trade Unions).
Little known to Western historical journalism is the history and stages
of the development of workers' organizations in central Europe and above
all in the vast territories included within the Austro-Hungarian empire
which included a large part of the Slavic populations of central and
southern Europe, as well as naturally to the territories of German
tradition and culture, to the Polish ones and to the also exterminated
territories of the Russian empire.[3]What is certain is that even in the
territories of Central and Eastern Europe the presence of populations of
traditional Jewish culture and religion was very strong and significant,
proof of this is the fact that in many of these areas Yiddishit was a
very widespread and spoken language and in some areas even hegemonic
such as, for example, in the territories of present-day Belarus where
the official languages in the twenty years preceding the Second World
War were three: Russian, Polish, Yiddish . Throughout the German, Polish
and Russian territories there were many newspapers and the Yiddish
language press edited by workers' and peasants' organizations was
flourishing.
The organized forces of the workers' and peasants' movement were thus
able to develop and grow their own culture, which in the struggle for
emancipation and against exploitation also developed its own values in
the educational and pedagogical field, as is the case with the
libertarian education methods propagated by Francisco Ferrer y Guardia
and his Modern School. Thus the proletariat, struggling, was building
step by step the future society, its institutions, the organizational
structures of social management.
The last thirty years of the 19th century and the first twenty years of
the 20th are characterized by a strong migration from Europe to the
Americas. Within this gigantic migratory phenomenon, the Jewish
component is particularly numerous as it is driven to emigrate not only
by the search for better living and working conditions, as was the case
for the many proletarians, but also by religious persecution, by
progroms fueled by growing racism and anti-Semitism of the populations,
artfully fueled by the strong powers that used the Jewish presence to
point it out as a danger to be waved off and on which to unload social
tensions and class hatred.
The activities of many Jews, dedicated to small business, to the
management of small loans, to the exercise of liberal professions,
delivered them to the hatred of the less wealthy classes who saw them as
the direct collectors of the small loans obtained, the managers of their
miseries, not realizing that they constituted the first immediately
visible link (the lowest) of a class-structured society in which wealth
was concentrated in the hands of a few.
Religious hatred, sown for centuries by Catholics against those people
who were pointed out as the murderers of Christ, did the rest and was
the fuel for sudden revolts and massacres of Jews which had the effect
of pushing many of them to flee and emigration.
In this wandering around the world the Jews, like other proletarians,
brought with them their experiences, their lives, their habits, the
chains of family solidarity, language, culture, religion, but also
political beliefs.
The latter were particularly strong and solid, strengthened by the
constant attention of the Yiddish- speaking populationsfor their
traditions, inclined to cultivate and maintain their language and their
culture, conveying through it ideas, dreams, political projects and the
vision of a possible future society, where the elementary needs of men
and women were satisfied, in which social equality and solidarity
reigned, where the sense of community of belonging prevailed, the search
for the realization of a common ideal, the trust in a possible future
society of free and equal, where communism and its last instance
anarchy, they could find fulfillment.
The propensity to cultivate this dream also came from religious
tradition. Many of them, having abandoned their religious beliefs and
embraced those of materialism and social revolution, carried in their
new beliefs the aspiration for utopia, the belief in a possible
apocalypse, which would transform the world, make humanity better and
happier , marking the realization of the return to the origins of the
species, the return to that earthly paradise whose dream had been handed
down by religion and which, in the new class vision, became the
realization of communism and anarchy, the return to the state of nature
original, happy, when the dominion of man over man and the thirst for
power had not yet perverted human nature. The wait for the return of the
messiah and the certainty of his coming were transfigured and
transformed into the inevitable victory of communism, bringing out a
scientistic determinism not shared by the anarchist component of the
workers' and peasants' movement but certainly widespread.
Scrolling through the biographies of the thousands of anarchist
militants - and particularly anarchist communists - who brought their
experiences around the world and distinguished themselves in the class
struggle, the presence of men and women of Yiddish culture, language and
tradition is therefore particularly numerous , important and significant
both for the leadership role they assumed in the peasant workers'
struggles and for their contribution of thought. of theoretical
elaboration, of political planning, manifested in the direction of trade
unions, parties and class organizations which strengthened and oriented
the development of the class struggle.[4]

It is therefore not surprising that when the ax of repression fell on
the American workers' movement in 1917, with the beginning of the great
persecutions and expulsions from the United States, when the First World
War disrupted the workers' organizations, bringing death among the
proletarians called to fight in the trenches of the European war in the
name of nationalism and homeland, when the disillusionment of the
Russian revolution, fought and defeated in its egalitarian and
libertarian demands by the Bolsheviks, made its effects felt, when the
defeat of the socialist, anarchist and communist movement throughout
Europe after the end of the First World War and in the tragic twenty
years between the two wars shocked the militants of the class struggle;
when in the 1930s the trade union and political movements in Latin
America were defeated, there were quite a few militants of the class
struggle of Yiddish language and culture. driven by racist and
anti-Semitic persecution, they found themselves taking the road to
Palestine.

The population massacres resulting from the war, the death of millions
of men depopulated the districts of Europe and induced the racist and
xenophobic right and anti-Semitism to broaden its range of action and to
formulate the "Kalegi plan theory" of replacement ethnic, widening the
sphere of action of class hatred.
Overall it was a gradual and slow process which is worth reconstructing
in its stages in order to be able to grasp both the motivations and the
distinctive characteristics and finally understand the limits and the
final reasons for distancing and definitive separation, when the
relationship between means and ends of the project of building the ideal
state, of the new society in Palestine, appeared clearly irreconcilable.

3]The presence of a strong peasant and worker movement and of a
widespread cooperative movement in Bulgaria dominated by anarchism is
forgotten; of trade unions and workers' associations in Central Europe,
in the territories of present-day Belarus, in the Ukrainian Donbass, in
Czechia, in the Baltic countries, in Sweden, just to name a few
examples... And all this while a strong trade union movement was growing
not only in Italy , but also in Spain, France, Germany and the United
States, where alongside the AFL CIO, the Industrial Wolkers of the Word
(IWW) had been operating since 1905, organizing the most radical and
revolutionary workers.

[4]It is impossible to point out the thousands of anarchists of Jewish
culture belonging to the various tendencies of anarchism. In this place
we limit ourselves to mentioning among the best known: Emma Goldman,
Alexander Berman, Gustav Landauer, Rudolf Roker. See: G. Pinelli
Archive, bulletin no. 15, Special anarchists and Jews, April 2000,
https://centrostudilibertari.it/sites/default/files/materiali/bollettino_15.pdf

https://www.ucadi.org/2023/11/05/i-comunisti-anarchici-la-questione-ebraica-e-quella-palestinese/
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